Smart Farm Management Solutions: Innovation From the CropIn Stable!
Taking a cue from this information and after observing the current scenario, CropIn Technology Solutions Pvt Ltd, one of the most innovative “agro” start-ups has developed and put on offer a low cost pay-as-you-use product on an IT platform on Cloud integrated with Android based smart mobile app. This would enable them to bring affordable state of the art technology in agriculture, remotely monitor farms, make every farmer adopt the best global agricultural practices and make every crop traceable so that harvested crops meet global quality standards. Their research has revealed the presence of a large number of farmers, with under half-acre land, who require basic level of assistance in farm management. CropIn has also associated itself with Global G.A.P, a Global partnership for Good Agricultural Practice, in order to provide the best practices to farmers via a Global GAP certification.
Krishna Kumar, the founder CEO, an engineer by profession worked for 4.5 years with General Electric. With a passion to introduce technology innovation to agriculture sector, Krishna left his lucrative job at GE, and begin CropIn Technology(erstwhile CropEx ) in August 2010. With Kunal Prasad, an MBA and an engineer with 4 years experience at TATA Motors, joining him soon, his efforts got a huge boost. Currently, they have Vasudev Avadhani, Consultant Clean-Tech at IIM-B, as their Mentor. He is assisting them in charting a road-map for CropIn as they aspire to achieve new levels.
“After a successful pilot with assistance from Safal, the NDDB arm, CropIn was able to attract multinationals like Field Fresh and PepsiCo. Today CropIn has more than 10,000 acres of farms belonging to 8000 odd farmers, some having less than half acre land, using their product on the IT platform and top four multinationals viz. PepsiCo, Bharti-Delmonte-Field-fresh, Bharti-Walmart and Omnikan (a division of MARICO Group) as their paying customers-a remarkable feat indeed for a startup that began its commercial operations in June 2011”, says Vasudev betting largely upon CropIn.
CropIn is planning to bring their product solution on Windows 8 & BlackBerry mobile platforms which would enable them to address 85% of global mobile customers in the Agri-business. The Smart Mobile App helps customers manage their crops or diaries or farms smartly. “Say, if the sown seeds have not been nipped off after a certain period of time, it shows a red mark in the App. Upon observing this red mark, the Field Manager contacts the farmer and informs him about the delay in nipping off the bud ”, says Kunal explaining the technology. What is more interesting is that the CropIn Technology product can be customized to be used by Banks to track loans taken from them by normal and hybrid seed suppliers, fertilizer companies, fungicide and insecticide manufacturers, Agriculture and Horticulture Research and Development Agencies to experiment or benchmark practices for best yield.
CropIn Technology had been selected as one of the top 10 startups by YourStory’s Techspark’11 and has also been featured on CNBC Young Turks Program. Recently at Microsoft BizSpark event, CropIn Technology was selected as one of the 16 most innovative and exciting new software products coming out of India and stood 2nd runner-up in the final competition.
CropIn Technology expects to touch a revenue of Rs 1.25 crore in the first year of its operation by March 2013 and Rs 30 Crores by March 2016.
For Smart Farm Management Solutions visit CropIn.